


Go in Peace

by sparxwrites



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Car Accidents, Other, reaper!dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 06:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy liked to think of himself as a good man. Not a devout man - he cursed, and thought impure thoughts, and he’d certainly not been a virgin on his wedding night - but a good one. A good husband, a good dad… He might not be a saint, but he liked to think he was good.</p>
<p>He liked to think he didn’t deserved the crash.</p>
<p>(In which Dean, Castiel, and Jimmy meet in somewhat unorthodox circumstances. AU where Dean is a reaper.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go in Peace

Jimmy liked to think of himself as a good man. Not a devout man - he cursed, and thought impure thoughts, and he’d certainly not been a virgin on his wedding night - but a good one. A good husband, a good dad… He might not be a saint, but he liked to think he was good.

He liked to think he didn’t deserved the crash.

He was stood there now, staring at the wreckage of his car, watching the emergency personnel swarm over it. Not that he cared, really - a car was a car, and it had served his purpose well. No, what he cared about was the arm he could see hanging out the shattered back window, small and pale. Claire.

She had to be okay. She  _had_  to be. He would never forgive himself if she’d come to any harm because of him.

They pulled his wife out as he watched, screaming and twisting and trying to get away from the firefighter holding her back, trying to go back to the car. Claire came next, limp and pale and face covered in blood, but chest still rising and falling easily, and something in his throat loosened at the sight. They were safe. His family was safe.

He felt like he should have been surprised when they pulled out his body last of all from the driving seat, face and chest a fractured mess of bone and blood and glass, but he wasn’t. There was no horror, no concern, only resignation and a vague curiosity.

"Am I dead?" he asked quietly, of no one in particular, because this didn’t seem much like Heaven. There were no heavenly choirs or golden staircases, and what he remembered of the moments before the silver car had slammed into his door was filled with noise and fear and darkness rather than tunnels of light. He wasn’t really expecting an answer - there was no one around to hear him, distanced as he was from the crash, even if he wasn’t dead.

"Afraid so."

He didn’t jump, or freeze, or spin around and stumble backwards as he might have done if he’d been alive. Death had a strange way of changing one’s priorities, apparently. “Why?”

"Because that’s just the way things are. People live, people die. There’s a list. Just sort of happens, really." The man that came to stand next to him didn’t look like God, in his worn jeans and leather jacket, a halo of black light whirling above his head. But the Bible teaches that God comes in many forms, so Jimmy thought it was probably polite to ask.

“Are you God?” he asked curiously, keeping his tone carefully neutral. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do if the man said yes – or, as a matter of fact, if he said no.  
The man laughed, shaking his head. “if I had a dime for every time a soul asked me that….” He sighed, grinning. “No, kid. I’m not God. Not even  _a_ god, actually.”

“The Devil?” He looked more like Lucifer than God, if Jimmy was being honest, but he thought –  _hoped_  – that he’d not done anything to damn his eternal soul to Hell. Again, though, it seemed best to check.

The man raised an eyebrow. “Now you’re just being rude,” he said, an edge of irritation in his voice. “I’m Dean, okay? Just Dean. Guy before me was called Death, but that’s a bit morbid, and ain’t great for public relations, really.”

“…Death,” said Jimmy weakly, eyeing Dean with eyebrows so high off his forehead they were in danger of disappearing into his hair..  
“Yeah.” Dean shrugged. “He was a pretty cool guy. Well. Still is. I’m just the one that does the day-to-day stuff now. He micromanages, y’know?”

The urge to laugh hysterically was rising in Jimmy’s chest, because – for all that death seemed to have killed his ability to be surprised – this was all just a little bit too surreal. “Death- micromanages. Right.” He took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and forced some of the craziness down, even if he thought he had a right to feel like he was going a little insane considering he was  _dead_  and talking to some guy running the afterlife instead of Death.

Dean was watching him, with something like amusement in his eyes. “It means he gets to feel involved and do the big stuff, and still spend most of his time eating fast food and… actually, I dunno what the hell else he does, really.”

Jimmy really had no idea what to say to that, so he nodded, slowly. “Okay.” He paused, glancing over at the car, the ambulances having cleared from around it and the wracked being hooked up for towing away, and then back to Dean. “So, do you… pick everyone up in person, then? Or am I just special?”

“You’re just special.” Dean’s mouth lifted into a soft almost-smile, something oddly indulgent in his eyes. “Usually, reapers deal with the day-to-day stuff, but every so often there’s someone I gotta do by myself. Well,” he corrected, nose wrinkling. “I didn’t  _have_  to do you, but Cas asked, so…”

He gestured to his head, to the halo of black light which hung there, and it whipped around faster, small tendrils reaching for his fingers. If Jimmy didn’t know better, he’d have thought the thing was purring – he could almost  _feel_  the noise of it, so quiet it didn’t echo so much in his ears as in his bones and across the surface of his skin.

“Cas says you’re important,” said Dean, and then paused. “Well. He says you’re important to him. In another life, in another world, you would have been…” He paused again, seeming to struggle with whatever the halo was telling him, eyes flicked up towards the sky and lines of tightness around his mouth. “The same person? Two sides of a coin? The- the concept’s kinda hard to explain. But you’d have been important to him.”

The halo had been slowly leeching off his head as he spoke, winding itself around his fingers and circling them instead in a complicated, multi-looped pattern. Dean sighed, running his fingers through the dark light of it, and lifting his hand towards Jimmy’s face.

“What is it?” asked Jimmy, recoiling a little – the blackness of it was terrifying, alien, absolute, although if he squinted hard enough he swore he could see lightning within its depths. “A- a creature, or-?”  
“Cas?” Dean laughed, amused by his instinctive concern. “Castiel’s an angel. You’ve got nothing to fear from Cas – not unless you’re planning on taking a swing at me, anyway.”

There was something in his voice there, a story; the story of how an angel of the Lord came to be crowning the head of Death’s replacement, perhaps. But Jimmy didn’t push. Some stories are meant to be private.

He watched the angel for a long moment, watched its hypnotic spinning and the questing fingers it put out in his direction, as if it were a snake sending out a tongue to taste the air around him. “What now?” he said, eventually, still unable to tear his eyes away from the blackness. “What happens to me now? Do I stay here?”

“Do you want to?” asked Dean, and there was genuine curiosity in his voice. As if, should Jimmy say yes, he’d genuinely let the soul stay roaming the Earth.  
“No.” The answer was almost immediate – although he loved his wife, his daughter, the idea of staying and watching them live their lives without him was unimaginably painful. “No, I don’t.”  
“Then I’ll send you on.” Dean reached up the hand encircled by dark light, ran his fingers through his hair and slicked his halo back into place. “To wherever you’re going next.”

“And where would that be?” asked Jimmy, as Dean raised two fingers towards his forehead.

Dean laughed – and then paused, fingers inches from the human’s skin, surprised. After a moment, though, he smiles. “Cas says, don’t worry. You’re going to Heaven,” he said, voice warm and amused. “Now, go, Jimmy Novak. Your work here is done. You’ve done enough.”

The fingers touched his forehead, warm and firm and somehow bright, and a voice in his ear whispered,  _Go in peace, you who have loved and served the Lord. Your family will be with you in good time._ His eyes closed.

When he opened them again, it was to the sight of Claire’s first birthday party, and his wife’s radiant smile.

**Author's Note:**

> I just really love the idea of reaper!Dean with trueform!Cas as his guardian angel and the two of them just being really sweet and shepherding lost souls to the afterlife and loving each other so much wow.


End file.
